Commodity exchanges in Europe and Central Asia: A means for management of price risk

This study discusses commodity exchange in the European and Central Asian (ECA) region as a tool for risk management. There are well over two-hundred entities active in the region that call themselves “commodity exchange” (and many more registered commodity exchanges that are no longer active) but most exchanges would not be recognized as such by people familiar with commodity exchanges as they exist in Europe and the Americas. Exchanges resemble wholesale markets or merely act as a mechanism for registering commodity transactions for taxation purposes.

This study does not aim to provide a comprehensive overview of all such exchanges but rather focuses on exchanges that provide explicit risk management tools and discusses how the offer of risk management tools (particularly for agriculture) by such exchanges can be improved.